The Guermantes Way: Chapters One and Two (20th post)

 

As previously mentioned, almost half of The Guermantes Way is taken up with accounts of two parties held respectively by the Marquise de Villeparisis and by her niece, the Duchesse de Guermantes. I would like to have ignored these events as we learn almost nothing of interest, but they have some importance for Marcel's social development, so I intend to cover them both in one post. There is another long section devoted to a dinner-party, that of the Princesse de Guermantes, but that is in Part I of Cities of the Plain, and it will have to wait until a later post.

Chapter One: the Marquise de Villeparisis's party

Marcel's entrance to aristocratic society begins with an invitation to an event one afternoon at Mme de Villeparisis', who has known his grandmother since they were girls and is the great aunt of his friend Robert de Saint-Loup. 

La Comtesse de Boigne
(a model for the 
Marquise de Villeparisis

Before the description of her tea-party we are given a discussion of the hostess's social standing. We learn that, although she was born into the Guermantes family and married into an equally renowned family, she does not “enjoy any great position in the social world”. For the past 20 years, she has had an intimate relationship with the old ambassador, the Marquis de Norpois (see my 13th post here), but Marcel doubts that is the reason for her loss of caste and speculates that maybe she had entered into scandalous relationships when young, but concludes, that even if that had been the case, it was more likely that her social degradation was caused by her being more of a bluestocking than a society lady (pp.249-250 V Scott Moncrieff, pp.187-188 II Kilmartin). The consequence is that despite her parties having been brilliant in the past, they are now viewed as “third-rate” by the more fashionable echelons of high society (p.263 V SM, p.198 II TK). Nevertheless, it is here that Marcel is introduced to the first-rate Duchesse de Guermantes (p.271 V SM, p.205 II TK).

Marcel finds in attendance at the salon his old Jewish friend Albert Bloch, who is on the way to becoming a successful dramatist. (I am intending to do a separate post on Bloch because he is a highly amusing character, equally grandiloquent and gauche, and here he is no different notwithstanding his star having risen). For example, Mme de Villeparisis is painting some blossom while entertaining her guests. Bloch goes across to look at his hostess's still life and “tried to express his admiration in an appropriate gesture, but only succeeded in knocking over with his elbow the glass containing the spray of apple blossom, and all the water was spilled on the carpet”. To try to cover his embarrassment, he says it is of no importance because he is not wet, but mutters angrily to himself: “'If people can't train their servants to put flowers where they won't be knocked over and wet their guests and probably cut their hands, it's much better not to go in for such luxuries'”. Being highly strung and unable to admit having blundered, he makes up his mind to leave and never to go into society again, until Mme de Villeparisis persuades him to stay. He then goes on to give offence by describing her nephew as a “dirty dog” and committing various other faux pas, before expressing his desire to talk about the Dreyfus affair with M de Norpois, whom he immediately describes as senile. Ignoring this slight, she sends for M de Norpois, who she says has been sorting papers in her library for the past couple of hours. However, so as not to allow the guests to realise that he is living there, when he arrives he pretends that he has just come in from the street and has not yet seen her. He “picked up the first hat that he had found in the hall, and came forward to kiss Mme de Villeparisis's hand with great ceremony, asking after her health with all the interest that people show after a long separation. He was not aware that the Marquise had already destroyed any semblance of reality in this charade, which she cut short by taking M de Norpois and Bloch into an adjoining room” (pp.293-301 V SM, pp.221-227 II TK). They discuss the cause célèbre, but Bloch fails to elicit from evasive former diplomat any opinion on Dreyfus's guilt or innocence and only receives his views on minor aspects of the affair.

At the end of the event, Marcel leaves with the Baron de Charlus, who says that despite it being likely to cause himself great inconvenience, he is considering bestowing on Marcel a highly  valuable favour. He is vague about its nature and breaks off to talk about Bloch, of whom he says that it is always a good idea to include an occasional foreigner amongst one's friends. When Marcel replies that Bloch is French, Charlus expresses surprise, saying he thought he was Jewish. Charlus's antisemitism quickly gets far worse. He suggests that a show should be put on for his amusement with “'a battle between your friend and his father, in which he would smite him as David smote Goliath. That would make quite an amusing farce. He might even, while he was about it, deal some stout blows at his hag (or, as my old nurse would say, his 'haggart') of a mother. That would be an excellent show, and would not be unpleasing to us, eh, my young friend, since we like exotic spectacles, and to thrash that non-European creature would be giving a well-earned punishment to an old camel'”. Charlus returns to the theme of how he will help Marcel, but his language is so elusive it is not clear whether he is promising to reveal to Marcel the secret homosexuality of various eminent men or to personally groom him for entrance into their secret “freemasonry”. Perhaps the latter is suggested by the price that Charlus puts on this favour: Marcel must see him every day and eschew society events (pp.392-402 V SM, pp.294-303 II TK). 

Finally, Marcel learns from Charlus that the lady whose party he has just attended is not after all a real marchioness – she had married a M Thirion, who then simply assumed the title Marquis de Villeparisis (p.403 V SM, p.303 II TK). It would seem that this is the real reason why she did not “enjoy any great position in the social world”.

Chapter Two: the Duchesse de Guermantes's party

Following the Marquise de Villeparisis's tea-party, Marcel also goes to a soirée there, where he talks to the Duchesse de Guermantes and is invited to dinner at her house. The invitation represents a chance for him to move from the name to its referent, in the same way as he did when visiting Balbec for the first time. The distinction between the name and the referent, however, is not as clear cut as it was in that latter case because, unlike Balbec, Marcel has already seen the Duchess several times, starting with her appearance at the wedding of Dr Percepied's daughter in Combray (see my 7th post here), and then later at the theatre and when walking near home in Paris (see my 18th post here), and he has been introduced to her at her aunt's tea-party (see above). Nevertheless he does not know her personally and as we saw (in the 18th post) he feels the need “to explore in the drawing-room of Mme de Guermantes, among her friends, the mystery of her name”. If those earlier episodes could be called Personal Names: The Name, this one would be Personal Names: The Person. And it follows the usual formula: names/imagination → referent/disappointment. After 180 pages filled with the names of various aristocrats and their genealogies, snobbery (which Marcel appears to share, using terms such as “superiors” and “inferiors”), the narrator's prolonged genuflection to the Duchess's charm and wit consisting exclusively of charmless put-downs of absent friends, acquaintances and relatives, and a repetitive and tedious comparison of the Guermantes's relatively free spirit with that of their dyed-in-the-wool rivals the Courvoisiers (whose only role in the whole novel is to act here as a foil), Marcel admits as much himself: “the reality had disappointed me at Mme de Guermantes’s (people’s names are in this respect like the names of places)” (p.356 VI SM, p.589 II TK). 

Whereas various incidents occur at the parties of the Marquise de Villeparisis and the Princesse de Guermantes (as we shall see) and break up the society chatter, nothing really happens at the party of the Duchess and this staticity begins to tell not just on the reader but on the Duchess herself and eventually on Marcel. At one point, after a discussion of who was related to whom, the Duchess murmurs to Marcel: “'Really, I find all that sort of thing too deadly. Listen, it’s not always as boring as this at my parties. I hope that you will soon come and dine again as a compensation, with no pedigrees next time'” even though, for Marcel, the discussion of people's pedigrees was what “saved my evening from becoming a complete disappointment” (p.306 VI SM, pp.552-553 II TK). Marcel realises that the other guests are uttering “nothing but trivialities”, even though he blames that on his own presence, and tries to slip away. He asks himself: “Was it really for the sake of dinners such as this that all these people dressed themselves up and refused to allow the penetration of middle-class women into their so exclusive drawing-rooms—for dinners such as this?” (pp.322-323 VI SM, pp.564-565 II TK). Ironically, the narrator warns that while the conversation of aristocrats, as custodians of the past, can be a pleasure for a writer, it is not without danger “for there is a risk of his coming to believe that the things of the past have a charm in themselves, of his transferring them bodily into his work, still-born in that case, exhaling a tedium” (p.333 VI SM, p.572 II TK). This is a case of Proust trying to have his madeleine and eat it.

One amusing part of the account of the party comes when the guests are given an example of the Duchess's drollery. There has been much talk of the wit of the Guermantes and the Duchess is acknowledged to be its epitome. Her husband gives an example: when someone had said to her that Charlus was “such a teaser”, she had replied: “'Then he must be Teaser Augustus'”. This pun is feeble in English. In French it is considerably cleverer: her reply is that he is “Taquin le Superbe”, a play on the name Tarquin le Superbe (the last king of Rome). The pun is clever because “un taquin” is a tease and “superbe” can describe a person who is arrogant or haughty, which is a perfect description of Charlus. Thus, the amusement for French and English readers is of a totally different nature: the former can enjoy a pun that works in two ways; for the latter it is the repetition of the lame pun a dozen times over the next 30 pages as supposedly the greatest example of the wit of the Guermantes (pp.216-245 VI SM, pp.482-504 II TK). There is nothing more likely to be lost in translation than a pun and then to have to labour it for so long – poor old Scott Moncrieff!